The Romance of Restrictions

Neither modern dating, nor asian arranged marriage. What great literature can teach us about re-creating an Age of Romance.

It is an interesting paradox about the past that women speak about the gilded age of corsets and ballgowns with an equal measure of disdain and romantic longing. Period dramas attract female audiences in the millions, even as modern women decry the “archaic” social structures of the pre-feminist world. What is the truth at the centre of this paradox? This is what I shall discuss here.

Not all pasts are equal, and consequently, when we speak of history, it should never be as a monolith. The past of Elizabethan England, Napoleonic Europe, is very different to the past of Athenian Greece, Decadent Rome, Mughal India or Shogun Japan. In each human civilization, there has always been an age of elegance that we romantically long for, and there is a key quality to this age that has made it so conducive to romance. This quality is, quite simply, a delicate balance between restriction and liberality.

For the sake of the discussion today, let us focus our gaze on Napoleonic Europe. There was something so enchanting about it all. Some may say that this is just Hollywood magic in depictions of Jane Austen’s novels, or War and Peace and other such glittering works of art. However, Hollywood has utterly failed to romanticise the present moment in any capacity, so we should not overestimate the ability of filmmakers to make romantic what is not essentially romantic to begin with.

Jane Austen’s England, Dumas’ France and Tolstoy’s Europe all depict societies where young men and women have serious restrictions on the rules of courtship and socialising, but without a complete and restrictive purdah that we see in more segregated societies such as in the Middle East and South Asia. This protected the virtue of women, and protected both men and women from their own follies related to the opposite sex such as well the dangers of heartbreak, unwise relationships, being exploited or manipulated, and, to an increasingly relevant degree, protected them from a life of involuntary loneliness that we are seeing more of today in both men and women. How did they accomplish this? Let us go through the structures.

Coming Out to Society

Young women had to “come out to society” in order to be permitted to go to parties with older company, to wear certain kinds of more ornamental and beautiful clothes and hairstyles restricted to women who could be courted, and in order to be permitted to be courted at all. Girls who had not come out yet, were seen as children and stuck more to their parents or relatives. This restriction made the magic of courtship so much more exciting for young girls. They looked forward to being able to “come out” at the conclusion of her education in her late teens. This also prevented young girls from feeling the pressure to “date” or impress boys when they were still children themselves just to keep up with other girls. Many times girls of 13 and 14 only get a boyfriend because all their friends are suddenly getting one, and not because they genuinely have those feelings. Teen girls are also generally unprepared emotionally and mentally for marriage, so any kind of courtship is just a heartbreak in waiting, which, contrary to popular belief, offers nothing but harm to a young woman and in a decent society, would be an abnormal experience.

Coming out also permitted young women to understand that courtship was a means to an end for marriage rather than a frivolous pass time. When they were finally permitted to socialize with young men and be courted, they could take it seriously as something that could lead to marriage. Furthermore, they could be courted by many different kinds of men several years their senior whereas teen girls today are just limited to the boys in their class at school. A 20 year old girl today is far more likely to only date other 20yo boys, most of whom are neither emotionally, nor practically prepared for marriage. However, a girl who had come out to society could be equally courted by a 25-28 year old man who would be far more likely to be in a position to marry and would not string along a potential love-interest through years of uncertainty.

Arranged Marriage vs Courtship

Coming out is contrary, not simply to teen dating, but also to arranged marriage. In arranged marriage culture, girls do not “come out”. In very strict cultures, girls are never allowed to mingle with the opposite sex. Rather they are just required to marry whomever the girl’s parents decide or recommend to her. This has some benefits over general dating, because it ensures that the girl does not waste her time with poor quality young men, and young men with poor quality girls. Parents and elders have an ability to judge qualities in people that young people cannot often perceive well. For example, parents may be able to tell a boy who is lazy and entitled or a girl who is spoilt and manipulative in a split second whereas their children would take much longer to recognise these qualities and suffer for their lack of recognition. Older people can also judge families, prospects and other more practical qualities. For example, a young girl is more likely to fall in love with a bum than her mother is likely to approve of one.

However, arranged marriages do not account for chemistry and tend to rip the romance out of the situation because they remove the courtship aspect entirely. Rather than the situation where the man has to court the young woman, using charm and wit, feeling and chemistry, dance and music, the whole relationship is reduced to a transaction between two sets of parents like they’re exchanging goats and chickens, the end product being grandchildren. It is for this reason that few love stories come out of these cultures and marriage is framed more as a duty than a bond with deep romantic love. Many of these couples, one observes, behave around each other like siblings rather than lovers and both the man and woman act out their unsatisfied libidos in strange ways. The women smother their sons and the men dissociate from family life entirely. Some people like the Bronze Aged Pervert argue that arranged marriages also foment dysgenic societies because people who were never meant to get married because of their terrible personalities still manage to find a way to marry and have no impetus to improve themselves in this regard.

In societies with proper courtship rituals, where parties and balls are organized by the elders for the benefit of the young people, young men and women can socialize, flirt, and find good matches in a natural and healthy way. The parents may restrict certain types of people like criminals and prostitutes from entering the courtship arena while still permitting the young people to have some measure of control and responsibility for whom they attract and whom they repel. Their social skills and charm still matter and influence their ability to find a husband or wife. This means that the final person one ends up marrying would be someone that one has chemistry with rather than a strange who might not understand you at all.

Flirtation

The restriction to court the opposite sex in these organized environments, but without the liberality to see each other wherever and whenever increased the scarcity element of desire. You’re far more likely to respect someone and develop feelings for them if you can't just see them whenever you want to. There are many types of restrictions in courtship that permit romance to flourish. There are many fictional literary examples that illustrate this. When Edmund and Mary like each other in Jane Austen’s Mansfield park, the couple must invent lots of walks to go on with the entire group of young people and must be satisfied with innuendo and hidden messages to get their affections communicated. They must speak more with the eyes and the body language. Spending time together alone without a chaperone is not permitted so it makes it all the more clandestine and romantic when they are able to get away for fifteen minutes alone anyway by some happy accident of circumstance.

In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Angel Claire is hopelessly in love with Tess, he cannot just spend time with her however he wants to. He cannot invite her out to coffee or drinks alone. He cannot even be permitted to go on walks alone with her. Tess is a lower class milk maid and Angel is a gentleman, but, nevertheless, the rules of decorum still apply to them. The affection between Angel and Tess is allowed to grow when it is given the distance for longing to flourish, as it always flourishes from afar. He invents excuses to be out in the field while she is milking the cows or doing some other chore just so he can see her, or bump into her and speak to her by some excuse.

The most romantic scene I’ve ever read in literature is perhaps this one: when Tess and the other milk maids are trying to cross a large muddy puddle on the way to church in their nice clothes, they encounter Angel. He offers to carry each of the four girls across the puddle as a gallant gesture of good manners. But in reality, he does this primarily so that he can carry Tess across and have an excuse to hold Tess close to him. In modern culture, touch is so easy to access. Holding hands holds no mystery. Kisses are common place. Perhaps this accessibility that we have to each other is what destroys the opportunity to appreciate each other. We give ourselves away so easily that we destroy the prospect of desire and by extension of romance. The Age of Elegance had romance because it had restriction.

Jane Austen’s Price and Prejudice is perhaps one of the most famous romance novels ever written and depicts the courtship rituals and etiquette of early 1800s England. In this story, the distance and lack of instant communication is what stands out as the primary promulgator of romance. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, famously, do not see eye to eye and begin as “frenemies” so to speak. In the age of texting and DM-ing, they would have constant contact with each other and perhaps be sparring non stop on their phones with each other.

The lack of restriction for their conversation would prevent them looking in each other's eyes when they spoke, which communicates so much more than mere words. After the first time Mr. Darcy proposes, they cannot keep in contact, and must part. More than his explanatory letter, this parting is what allows Elizabeth to reflect and consider his character more thoughtfully and begin to fall in love with him.

When she begins to develop some feelings for Mr. Darcy, she does not know when or how she can possibly speak to him next within the bounds of proper manners and etiquette. She must and does wait until her aunt and uncle take her to his house in Pemberly and they are invited to dine with the family. Many people remember the delightful feeling of waiting for your phone to buzz with a text from your crush, and being absolutely glued to your phone for ages in that wonderful initial phase.

While this is a sweet feeling, imagine how much sweeter if the phone were not the third person in the relationship. The device that “brings us closer” may be the very thing deflating our passion and preventing us from experiencing the full spectrum of emotion that restrictions in communication inspire.

Prescriptions for Increasing Romance in the Modern Age

Restrictions in romance and courtship require young people to practice patience, chastity and temperance and these virtues have their own reward in the romance and passion that they promote. Arranged marriages and societies with complete sex segregation kill passion by the other extreme in that they do not even permit it to be ignited. One trims the fire, one douses it with water, and neither is conducive to good love stories.

I do not believe that any of us will toss out our phones any time soon, but we can throw more parties so that we see the opposite sex more in person than just an icon to dm on social media. Perhaps more of us will actually meet people, where real romance is always ignited, no matter how “good” the dms might seem to feel. We can prevent ourselves from being perpetually reachable by setting limits on when or how we check our messages. “Sorry I don’t text, I only do phone calls” might just be the thing that makes the difference between missed connections and real, bone chilling eroticism. Better yet, write each other letters and mail them.

Feel the distance and wait for each other. Allow yourself to desire. And then when you finally get together and get married, it means all the more to you, the vows are deeper, the fulfilment of them more sacred because you haven’t been through a dozen iterations of broken promises in pretend husband-wife scenarios in your life.